Tonight’s debate could be more significant than vice-presidential duels of the past

Vice-presidential debates rarely matter in politics except as fodder for jokes and, for today’s lazier commentariat, memes of the lesser variety. The greatest moment in modern vice-presidential debate history is Lloyd Bentsen’s “you’re no Jack Kennedy” zinger of Dan Quayle, a debate win so effective that Bentsen and Michael Dukakis lost forty states. Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman’s debate played out like a fireside chat between old friends. Joe Biden’s debates with Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan are mostly notable because watching them now puts in perspective how much the lifelong politician has faded into an ethereal ghost in his final years. Mike Pence won both of his vice-presidential debates against Tim Kaine and Kamala Harris fairly easily, but was mocked by the staggering corpse of today’s Saturday Night Live because a fly briefly landed on his head. The fly was played by Jim Carrey, but sadly, it was not funny.

It’s unlikely that tonight’s debate will be any different, but for the sake of consideration, let’s think through how it could be. The likeliest reason it could be different is that Tim Walz is an unknown quantity on the national stage. He has dodged interviews and conversations with any less than friendly interlocutor, and has not been questioned publicly about the many falsehoods that have been discovered since he was chosen as Kamala Harris’s running mate. Given the clampdown on access to candidates and a compliant anti-Trump press uninterested in pressing the matter, Walz has yet to respond to these questions personally or on camera — questions about clearly false claims about his military record, his experiences around the world and even about the fertility methods used in the birth of his children.

The most recent of these many exaggerations, as reported this week in a deep dive by Minnesota Public Radio and followed up with additional reporting by the Washington Free Beacon, is that Walz has for years claimed that he was visiting China during the Tiananmen Square uprising, a moment so iconic in his memory that he later chose it as the date he married his wife. As it turns out, Walz was definitively not in China at the time — photo evidence shows he was in Nebraska, and his trip came months later.

The distinction of being a lying politician is unremarkable. But for someone like Walz, ensconced in the safe bright blue state of Minnesota, the level of falsity here makes him a deeply odd person to pair with a major candidate who already suffers from accusations of inauthenticity. To the degree that J.D. Vance prosecutes the case against the Harris-Walz ticket, he will in all likelihood try to make the case that they cannot be trusted leading the country at a moment of serious challenge.

The risk for Vance is that he can win the debate in the moment while losing the audience. As the younger man on stage, he has to emphasize his credentials and personal experience in war, but focus on being Trump’s best ally, not an advocate for his own personal vision of the shifting policies of the right — a temptation that would be too intellectual and inside baseball for any public debate. He by now knows the line of attack that CBS’s moderators and Walz will use against him: that Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky has called him a radical, that he has a “weird” obsession with childless cat ladies and abortion, and that he is a young smart aleck tech bro jerk who doesn’t actually care about the place or people he came from. The last point is a trap, but it’s also very popular among online progressives. We know about J.D. Vance because of his life story, and he knows how to tell it in ways that speak directly to people forgotten by their national government. We’ll see tonight if Walz is foolish enough to take that bait.

As the last orchestrated moment of conflict between these two campaigns, this debate could be more significant than vice-presidential duels of the past. But as we saw with the relative lack of polling reaction to the Trump-Harris exchange, it may prove more useful as supplying more fodder for campaign advertising than anything else. Just don’t expect anything memorable from Jim Gaffigan and Bowen Yang on Saturday.